Dean stopped in front of the A-frame. "That's the place, all right!" Baird shouted. "Feller's in there right now."
"How can you be sure he's still there?" Sam asked.
"I've developed a kind of nose for 'em," Baird said. "This is the third time I've gone up a'gin 'em, after all. I know what they're thinkin', almost, except thinkin' ain't exactly what I'd call what they do."
"Come on," Dean said. "We can talk about it later." He reached into the back and drew out the Remington. Sam chambered a shell in the sawed-off. They locked eyes briefly and then clambered from the car. Harmon Baird followed, still wielding his antique.
The front door of the house was closed, but through floor-to-ceiling windows Dean could see that a door in back was ajar. He couldn't see any movement inside or any signs of struggle, or much of anything in the house. It seemed that whoever lived here had adopted a minimalist lifestyle, which was probably appropriate for someone whose house had a lot of windows.
"Cover the back!" he shouted. "I'm going in!"
Sam sprinted around the house. Baird hadn't quite reached the yard yet. Dean tried the doorknob, which was locked. He reared back and kicked the door just beneath the knob. With a loud splintering of wood, it flew open.
"Anyone home?" Dean called into the silence. For a second he thought no one was home and the old guy had been mistaken all along. But then, from somewhere on the second floor, up a flight of open-faced stairs, came a piercing scream.
"I guess someone is," he said to himself. He raced for the stairs. As he reached them, he saw Sam appear at the open back door. Dean jerked a thumb toward the upstairs, then pointed at Sam and made a palm-out "stay" signal. Sam nodded his understanding. Dean raised the shotgun and continued up. The upstairs was a loft, only occupying a third as much floor space as the downstairs. The stairway's wooden banister became a railing at the top, and behind it, after a small sitting area, were two doorways. One of the doors stood open, and through it Dean could hear frightened whimpering. Running bath water sounded through the other.
He swung into the doorway, bracing his right shoulder against the jamb, shotgun leveled. Inside the room a slender brunette in her fifties or so stood up against the far wall with tears running down her face. Between her and Dean was a soldier—not the one they had seen at the mall, but a younger guy, from about the same era if the uniform was any indicator—holding a wickedly huge knife in his right fist. A genuine bowie knife, Dean thought. The soldier advanced toward the woman, but the bed blocked his way. He stepped to his left like he would go around it, then raised his leg like he would step up on it. He lowered the leg again, apparently undecided.
"Ma'am," Dean said softly. "You might want to duck now." He backed up his words with a hand signal.
At the sound of his voice, the soldier turned around. He was just a kid, maybe seventeen or so—or that's how old he had been when he died. His throat had been slit, and the wound still gaped, dry and papery. Something had been gnawing on him, too—holes in his cheeks and forehead showed bone beneath. As he looked at Dean, he flickered, and for an instant it was like his bones were illuminated from inside by a bright lightbulb made from transparent black glass. Then he looked whole, as he must have in life, and then he flashed back to the slit-throat dead man Dean had first seen.
As indecisive as he had been before, he didn't seem to have any trouble recognizing that Dean—while not his initial target—represented the greater threat. He lunged toward Dean with the big blade. Dean pulled the Remington's trigger. The rock salt blast obliterated what remained of the young soldier's head and much of his chest. The woman, hunkered down in her corner, screamed as bits of him pelted her like rain.
The soldier's lower part teetered and fell, landing in a seated position on the bed for a few seconds before slumping to the floor. There he blinked in and out, in a pattern that was growing familiar to Dean, and vanished.
All the other parts of him disappeared at the same time. The walls were marked with rock salt, but not with the bits of flesh that Dean had just scattered all over.
"It's okay now," Dean said. "He's gone."
The woman, sobbing almost hysterically, wiped her hands at body parts that had been on her a moment before and were no longer.
"No, I mean completely gone," Dean said.
"But..."
"I know. Don't try to understand it," Dean suggested. "It's a lot easier that way."
The woman tried to smile through her tears. She rose and wiped a sleeve across her eyes. "Thank you. Whoever you are."
"No problem," Dean said. "And, uh, you might want to have someone come out and install a new door in front. I kinda broke yours."
TWENTY-THREE
As Dean had directed, Sam waited downstairs. Coming back down, Dean saw that he'd been able to hold Harmon Baird there.
"What happened, Dean?" Sam asked.
"There was another one of those soldiers," Dean said. "Just a kid. His throat had been cut, and he was trying to do the same to the woman who lives here. But the old guy's right—if you shoot them, they go away. Blink a few times and poof, gone, like they got stuck in a transporter beam."
"If you shoot them with the right load," Sam said. "Anyway, we should probably get Mr. Baird out of here before someone comes to investigate the gunfire."
"What I was thinking." Dean called back to the woman upstairs, who still hadn't left her bedroom. "Ma'am, we're taking off. There's a sheriff's officer down the street at the Riggins place. You might want to see if they can stick around until you get that door fixed."
She didn't answer, but comprehensible conversation was not yet within her capabilities. Dean thought she'd be okay once she got over the fright of the dead guy—and he had been ugly dead—trying to ice her.
Dean shrugged. He and Sam and Baird exited through the destroyed front door and hurried to their car. The sheriff's vehicle was still parked in front of the Riggins house. By the time Second Street vanished from the rear view for the second time that morning, no one had come out.
The summer that Dean had been fourteen and Sam ten, their father had taken them on a long hike into the Rocky Mountains. They'd been staying at a cabin in Colorado for a week, and it seemed almost like paradise to Dean. Blue skies, a swift creek running past the place where trout could be caught, a meadow on the other side of the creek, reached by crossing a rustic wooden bridge, that bloomed with thousands of wildflowers.
The thing that had prevented it from actually being paradise was that Dean was fourteen, and would rather have been meeting girls and playing sports and sleeping in than continuing what seemed like lifelong boot camp. Dad hadn't offered that option, though, and Dean went where Dad went and did what Dad said.
On this particular day Dean, Dad, and Sam shouldered heavy backpacks containing rations and equipment for a three-day stay in the wilderness. Dad had packed them both, and said Dean's weighed eighty pounds and Sam's sixty. With their respective burdens, they struck off into the higher elevations. They walked all morning, stopped for a quick lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and raisins from Dad's pack, then kept going. The meadows thinned and disappeared altogether. Deciduous trees were left behind. Eventually there were only scattered firs on hard, rocky slopes. The air was thin and cool.
Most of the way, Dad kept up a running patter, telling his sons lessons he had learned in the Marines or since their mother had died, on his hunting trips. He told them about the loup garou and the Manitou, Assyrian ekimmu, Greek keres, about mummies, golems, zombies, and much more. He described the tests and traps and traditions they would one day rely on. He had already taken the boys on several hunting trips, of course, but he told them that he was preparing them for the day when they would go without him.
Finally, as the day grew late, the side of the mountain they were on shrouded in shadow, he told them to take off their packs and sit. They obeyed, as they usually did.
Dad didn't remove his backpack. He remained standing. "The main thing I want you bo
ys to learn from this," he said, "is never to trust anyone. Even me. Always verify what you're told. Taking a few minutes to check might save you hours later on. It might even save your life."
"What do you mean, Dad?" Dean asked. An awful thought had already risen up in the back of his mind, and he realized that he hadn't paid much attention to the route they took to get here, counting on Dad to know the way back.
"I mean, neither of you checked your backpacks before we left. You just trusted that I put in the things you'll need out here."
"That we'll need?" Sam asked.
"You boys sit there for one hour," Dad said. "By then it'll be almost dark, and you'll need to make camp. Tomorrow you can head back to the cabin—if you remember the way. I don't expect I'll see you until the day after, or maybe the day after that."
"But..." Dean started to protest, then held his tongue. Dad tested them. That was what he did. He taught them and he tested them, and so far they had failed this particular test. He wasn't going to make it worse by complaining.
"Dad, you can't—" Sam began.
Dean cut him off. "Zip it, Sammy. We'll be fine."
Sammy zipped it, and Dad headed back down the mountain. Dean figured he'd be able to follow their tracks back—unless Dad took pains to erase them, which was the kind of thing he would do.
When he was gone, both boys opened their backpacks. The top layer looked legitimate—rolled-up tarps that might have passed for tents under a cursory examination. Beneath those, though, Dean's held a box of baseball cards, some cans of pork and beans but no can opener, a couple of bricks, a plastic bag full of wadded-up paper, and miscellaneous other objects of absolutely no use in the wilderness. Sam's was similarly packed. Neither one of them had a match, a sleeping bag or tent, a compass, or any accessible food. They had water in separate canteens, strapped across their chests and clipped to their belts, so Dean wasn't worried on that score.
But it was getting dark, and they would soon be starving and sleepy.
"What are we going to do?" Sam asked. He was only ten, so Dean tried to cut him some slack, but if the kid started to blubber, he was going to toss him off the nearest cliff.
"I'm going back down the hill," Dean said. "Try to get as far down as I can before it's dark. Inside the tree line it'll be warmer, and maybe we can find some berries, or a rabbit or something, for dinner."
"But we're supposed to stay here for an hour," Sam protested.
"That's what Dad said. He also told us our backpacks held supplies for three days. You want to believe everything he says, or you want to eat tonight?"
"Eat, I guess."
"Then let's get going."
They ended up getting back to the cabin just after dark on the next day—hungry, tired, and mad. But, Dean had to admit, having learned a valuable lesson.
He tried to apply that lesson now, listening to Harmon Baird's story. The old man had been right about two particulars. He had known which house was under attack, and that shooting the attackers put an end to them. Dean had verified both by going into the house and confronting the young soldier.
Sitting on Sam's bed in their room at the Trail's End, though, he told a story that would be difficult to verify. If Dean hadn't seen what he had—both throughout his life, and specifically since arriving in Cedar Wells—he wouldn't have believed a word of it.
"I'm ninety-one years old," Baird began, once they had turned up the heat in the room to a level he found comfortable and brought him a Dr Pepper from the soda machine. He had taken his hat off, and his head was nearly bald, just a few wisps of hair spreading across pink, tissue-like skin. "So I've already lived through two of these, what you call murder cycles. I just think of them as the forty-year."
"Forty-year what?" Sam asked.
"Nothing. Just forty-year. Ain't like I talk about it to other folks, and I know what I mean when I think it in my own head, right?"
"I guess that's true."
"Damn straight it is. So like I say, I've lived through two before. This one marks my third time. First one, I was just a sprout, of course. But I saw it happen. Saw my own father cut down with a tomahawk. My aunt shot in the back. My neighbor—this was the worst—my neighbor tied behind a horse and dragged, face down, until all the skin was flayed off his front side."
"Yeesh," Dean said. "That's harsh."
"Harsh it was, young man," Baird agreed. "But it left an impression, I can tell you that."
"Bet it did."
"Forty years later, as I reckon you know, it all started up again. This time I knew what was happening, because I saw the same sorts of attacks I remembered from the first go-round. Attacks by Indians and soldiers dressed in clothing and uniforms that had stopped being worn before the first set of murders. People who were there one second and gone the next, like you were opening and closing your eyes. And animals who changed their forms from one second to the next, who became people, people who became animals. It was all so familiar, and so terrible, seeing it happen a second time."
"What did you do?" Sam asked.
"Well, I fought back as hard as I could, that's what I did. The first time, none of them came for me, else I wouldn't be here now, most likely. But the second time? They came for me, all right. Nine times I was attacked. I used my rifle and my pistol and an ax and even a flaming log, in one case, to fight 'em off. I had seen what they could do and wasn't about to let 'em do it to me. Some of them I killed, if that's what you can call it, and others I just chased off. They like to have turned to easier prey, after tanglin' with me."
The old man rubbed his left eye, hard, as if trying to pry it out of its socket. Then he scratched at the end of his nose, leaving red marks. "I had married by then, and they did get my lovely Betty. I only left her alone at home for a short while, long enough to run into town for supplies and ammunition. I left a gun with her, too, but somehow they got her anyway, split her open from collarbone to breast. I buried her in the back and went out lookin' for whichever one had done that, but of course they can't really be followed."
"Why not?" Dean asked. "Don't they leave tracks?"
"Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Sometimes the tracks just trail away into nothing at all. Sometimes they change into other tracks. They don't really come from anywhere, you see. They... what's the word?" He snapped his fingers with a dry clicking sound. "They materialize, that's it, they materialize out of nowhere, then they do their dirty work, and then they vanish again."
"You've seen this?"
"After Betty was killed, I didn't go back into the house. I buried her and then I went out into the woods, because I'd seen 'em coming from there. I lived in that forest for days, as much animal as human I guess, trying to learn where they came from, if they had a leader, that kind of thing, you see? And what I found out was that they weren't there and then they were, and there wasn't any kind of sign you could see, anything that would tell you when or where they might materialize. One appeared right in front of me one night—almost on top of me—and I wondered what would have happened if he had appeared exactly where I happened to be standing instead of an inch away. Didn't ask him, of course, I tore his head off with my ax. That worked as good as shooting, seemed like. They ain't all that sturdy anymore, is the thing. They're strong, but they've been dead and they seem happy enough to go back to it."
"So we were on the right track," Sam said. "They are the reanimated dead."
"All we gotta do now is figure out who's reanimating them, and maybe why, then," Dean said. "And put a stop to it."
"Which isn't exactly right back where we started," Sam said. "It's just back in the same neighborhood. Mr. Baird, do you know of anyone who would have a grudge against Cedar Wells? Anyone who might be behind these attacks?"
Baird gripped his right elbow with his left hand and clicked the index finger of his right hand against his small yellow teeth. "I moved away from town after that second forty-year. Nineteen and sixty-six, that was. There was an element coming to town I didn't much care for—be
sides the dead folks, that is. And I couldn't see staying in town without Betty anyway. I didn't go far away, about fifteen miles as the crow flies, longer on the roads. But I kept track of the dates, of course, just in case it happened again. I was ready, I'll tell you that. Knew what I had to do, too. I had to come back to town and try to stop it."
"And you've been doing that," Sam said. "Which is why you've been spotted around some of the crime scenes. But what we need to know is, who do you think is behind it in the first place? There had to be someone who started the cycle of murders every forty years, and if we can find out who, we might be able to put a stop to it forever."
"I guess I didn't tell you up front," Baird said. "The first time, in 'twenty-six? My family worked on a big cattle ranch, and lived there, too. The attacks that killed my pa, my aunt, and our neighbor all happened on ranch property. My ma, afterward, she was convinced that the ranch had something to do with it all. That something had happened there that brought this evil down on the place. She wouldn't have anything to do with it after that, moved to town—even though I told her the killings happened in town, too, that the ranch wasn't alone in that regard, no way, no how."
"Do you believe her now? Do you think the ranch is behind it all?"
Baird grinned. The effect reminded Dean of a cartoon vulture eyeing a particularly tasty morsel.
"Heck, boys, I don't know. I don't care much for Cedar Wells or the ranch or any of it. The only reason I've stayed alive and come back for the forty-year was that I hate those ghosts or whatever they are more than I hate everything else. I've thought on it and thought on it, though, and I suppose the ranch might be where it all started."
"Can you take us there?" Dean asked him.
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